77% of employers reported they struggle with hiring & retaining talent. Recruitment is no longer limited to sourcing, interviewing, job offer letter creation, and onboarding. It has become more complex (if it wasn’t already). There are multiple aspects to the complexity-
- Skill-based hiring is on the rise. 73% of recruiters say it’s their top priority. That increases the talent pool by 10x. And so, you need a proper tech stack to pursue recruiting activities at scale to find your purple squirrel.
- Whilst DE&I initiatives now have a proven ROI proof with DE&I pro companies clocking 25% higher profits, 32% of candidates won’t even apply to the job posts if the workforce isn’t diverse.
- Remote/hybrid working is not going away anytime soon. 49% of job seekers are motivated by work flexibility options.
- For 52% of workers, learning, development, and growth are of high priority.
- Companies are increasingly trying to switch to data-driven HR, and track the KPIs and recruiting metrics like cost per hire, quality of hire, time to fill, etcetera.
In the current economic environment, which is oscillating like a pendulum low on battery, everyone is supposed to do more with less or be vulnerable to competitors feasting on their market share. Hence, as a recruiter, the truth is that you have to get good at juggling multiple responsibilities—most of them would be of high priority with zero margin of error. From job description creation to resume screening, interview assessments, candidate engagement & communications, offer negotiation, and onboarding—you would need to perform all this flawlessly with precision. That too in a cost-effective way. And that’s almost impossible without a recruitment database software. Recruitment databases are a compulsory element of any recruiting stack. In the first installment of this article, we discussed, what is recruitment database, why you need a recruitment database, and its benefits. This Skima AI insight would focus more on the recruitment database software features that you must look for to efficiently & effectively carry out your recruiting activities.
Without any further ado, let’s get started.
Top 5 Recruitment Database Software Features
“Recruitment database software is a digital approach to storing, searching, accessing, updating, and sharing organizational recruitment data. Its core feature is to store candidate resumes in a systematic and structured way and make them searchable.”
However, it is not sufficient for modern recruitment software to just deliver the core functionality. It needs to gel with the existing ecosystem and provide additional features to actually help recruiters. Here’s a comprehensive list of recruitment database software features that should be either built natively into the recruiting database software or should be availed with 3rd party integrations-
1. Candidate Resume Storing
This is the core USP of any recruitment database software. As a recruiter, you are often getting resumes from multiple streams, mobile communication apps, emails, niche job boards, social media, your talent sourcing platform, career site, and whatnot. It’s important to have them all stored in a way that these resumes are readily accessible to you. Here are some of the resume-storing-related features that you will find in the best recruitment database software-
- Bulk uploading
- Individual uploading
- Multiple resume formats support
- Importing submitted resumes from your job posts
- Integration with job boards
2. Resume Parsing
A challenge that might arise with storing resumes is the variations in the format. Some candidates have resumes in PDF, others have DOC, DOCX, TXT, and many have JPEGs as well. Some would even provide just their web URLs. Occasionally, if you are hiring on campuses, or via walk-in drives, you may get printed resumes.
How do you manage all the different formats, and then different resume templates within these documents?
This is exactly what the resume parsing feature is designed for. The best recruitment database software will compulsorily have a resume parsing feature embedded into the core offering. Its functionality is to programmatically extract and organize key information from a candidate's resume into structured data fields. This would include personal information, work experience, education & qualifications, skills, tools, projects, geographies, languages, training, certifications, and hidden signals that can be contextually computed from the resumes.
Here’s an extended list of resume parsing-related features you would find in recruitment database software-
- Duplicate resume detection
- Resume export in a standardized format
- OCR features for parsing image-based resumes
- Contextual information sensing
- Profile picture support
- Data enrichment capabilities
- Customizable parsing rules
- Version control of resumes
- Error-handling, and validation
- Data format consistency
- Integration with ATS
3. Categorization & Tagging For Better Segmentation
Often in recruiting, you would need to manage candidates in bulk. Let’s say, you want to have a set of candidates shortlisted for an upcoming job vacancy. You are exploring resumes for it because you are certain the position will be created, but you don’t know when. How do you remember the entire list of candidates that you want to shortlist for that role until you find the answer to your ‘when?’
The answer is in the categorization and tagging.
The ability to segment candidates/applicants is a crucial recruitment database software feature. For varied use cases, you can add labels to a candidate’s resume; maybe for certain hard-to-find skills, cultural attributes, working style, cross-functional diverse experience, multilingual talent, candidates that would need a little favor/push through certain stages of recruitment, etcetera.
In the top recruitment database software you’ll find some advanced tagging features such as
- Batch processing, aka bulk operations to remove or modify tags/labels
- Hierarchical categorization for nesting categories and subcategories
- Rules-based tagging or programmatic tagging automatically assigns tags based on predefined criteria or conditions.
4. Advanced Search Filters
You might have a talent pool of 100s of 1000s of candidates. How do you narrow your list of candidates that need to be approached for an opportunity? You use the advanced search filter feature. Now, basic search filters would include skill, education, job title, etcetera. However, today the talent needs could be very specific.
For example, you might want to hire a female CXO with prior experience running a 100M ARR fintech startup in the Asia Pacific region. Now, generic filters alone would not be enough. You would need an advanced recruitment database software that has diversity, industry, company, role, and revenue-based search filters. Diversity filters can supercharge your DE&I strategy. But it is rare to find in recruitment database software. Skima AI is a pioneer in the space and avails you of highly sophisticated DEI-focused filters.
Similarly, there could be filters for passive candidates, active candidates, language, company size, institution, certification, project scale, and a lot more. A truly modern recruitment database software would be loaded with the following search-related features-
- Boolean search
- Advanced relevance or certain criteria-based sorting options; maybe alphabetically, date, or salary expectation range.
- Search history
- Semantic search
- Dynamic filters
5. AI Matching Score
AI adoption has significantly improved in the HR domain. Dr. Neelesh Gupta, Director @ Deloitte India says
“Gen AI is revolutionizing talent management practices by transforming recruitment into a more inclusive, unbiased, and skill-oriented process while enhancing productivity and shaping the future of work.”
He added that 60% of organizations are already exploring different ways in which they can leverage AI in their recruitment lifecycle, and 40% are already using it.
One of the key fronts where AI is helping recruiters is identifying the most suitable candidates for a role. For example, Skima’s AI Matching Score product feature uses custom in-house machine learning algorithms to assign a relevance score to each of the candidates in your candidate’s pool (or the segmentation you might have created). This score is obtained for each candidate by vetting the information available in their resumes (both direct information and contextually analyzed signals) against the requirements specified in the job description.
The higher the score, the better the candidate is for the role.
In short, the AI Matching Score feature of a recruitment database software helps you speed up the process of assessing and ranking candidates that need to be considered for further interviewing. This helps reduce cost per hire, improves the quality of hire, and significantly brings down the time to fill.
More advanced AI Matching Score feature would avail you the ability to
- Assign custom weights (importance/priority) to different criteria (skills, experience, industry domain)
- Smart recommendations & predictive analytics capabilities to hire top talent
Checklist For A Recruitment Database Software Features
Resume storage, parsing, segmentation, search, and relevancy score are the core recruitment database software features. Additionally, a recruitment database software vendor can provide you with extended features to help you be more productive at recruiting. Here’s a comprehensive checklist of the top 19 features to look for in recruitment database software before you invest your money to make the purchase-
- Resume Storage
- Resume Parsing
- Segmentation & Tagging
- Advanced Search Filters
- AI Matching Score
- Candidate Relationship Management (for communication & engagement)
- Analytics & Reporting
- Collaborative Features
- Job Post Management
- Job Requisition Management
- Customizable Workflows
- Integration With Job Boards To Source Candidates’ Resumes
- Mobile Accessibility
- Reference Check Automation
- Candidate Document Management
- Templates Store
- Feedback & Note-taking
- Security & Compliance
- Industry Salary Insights
End Note
AI is going to change how you recruit, how employees work, and how workforces are built. There aren’t any two thoughts on that. What’s important is how proactively you upgrade yourself to adapt to the evolving AI-driven HR ecosystem. An important part of this is to upgrade your and your recruitment team’s hiring arsenal. Irrespective of your industry or the scale of your organization, embracing an AI-equipped talent-sourcing tool such as AI-powered recruitment database software can help improve overall talent outcomes for your company. It can supercharge your skill-based hiring strategy, DE&I initiatives, and innovation projects, and help build a resilient & thriving workforce. If you are keen on building future-ready workforces try Skima AI- your go-to all-in-one recruiting tool for finding, sourcing, and hiring the best of the best candidates.
